Psychedelic studies have become increasingly commonplace over the better half of the past decade, and I fear the free drug press has been routinely misrepresenting the scientific value of them. As a noted member of the national drug press myself, I humbly offer my sincerest pleas to my fellow journalists, to the research teams, and the general public: Stop hyping up extremely preliminary data in a misguided effort to portray psychedelics as a cure for everything that ails us. Let us aim our collective efforts toward broad legalization and decriminalization instead.

For those of you who don’t know or care about the legislative plight of our beloved psychedelics, allow me to enlighten thee. Once upon a time — from roughly the 1800s to the early 1900s — everything that got you high was either mostly unheard of in the United States or available through doctors or over the counter in a far looser fashion than they are today. There was virtually no regulation around drugs whatsoever. The old adage about Coca-Cola containing actual cocaine or the Tombstone-esque depiction of the laudanum-addicted housewife are both frighteningly accurate portrayals of pre-prohibition times.

In the past century, we’ve had a combination of bad luck, Richard Nixon, Nancy Reagan, Harry Anslinger — and Timothy Leary, but that’s a discussion for a different day — to blame for the prohibition of virtually everything under the sun that might be fun to get high on. We’re not here for a history lesson, but if you’re interested, it’s well worth reading about the past 100 years of American narcotics policy. It’s important to understand the path the federal government took from a free-for-all drug policy to the aggressive prohibition of plant medicines and entheogens, while the Sackler family, who owned Purdue Pharma, got rich killing patients with OxyContin. (Purdue Pharma is, of course, among the largest key players in igniting the early wave of the opioid crisis.) Eventually, that mode of operation gave way to a big lobbying push to legalize certain substances on the basis that they treat medical issues. 

In the mid 1990s, San Francisco was swamped with cases of people afflicted with HIV and AIDS. People were suffering, badly, and this is where the movement for legal cannabis began with the passage of California’s Proposition 215. Thank god that happened, because it eventually led to kids afflicted with epilepsy gaining access to life-saving CBD products in the early 2010s. Activists and legislators understood the logic that there were legitimate cases for the use of cannabis to treat debilitating illnesses. This spurred a massive push to legalize other drugs on the basis of using them as treatment for medical issues — often depression and anxiety — like ketamine (which was already legal, just used as an anesthetic in other areas of medicine, including surgeries, dentistry, emergency medicine), psilocybin, ibogaine, DMT, and more. 

This lobbying push, which undeniably started with the best of intentions and increased social acceptance of psychedelics, has opened the door to allow for more research to be performed. And that’s great! Unfortunately, a lot of that research seems to have been co-opted by amateur-hour research teams mischaracterizing and exaggerating the data we use to defend the medical potential of a lot of these drugs.

Personally, I’m a “progress is progress” kind of guy when it comes to beating back the shackles of prohibition. But we seem to have lost the plot a bit when it comes to how we study psychedelics and the conclusions we draw, and that will absolutely come back around to bite the movement directly in the ass. Also, when I say we, I’m referring to a spectrum of people ranging from actual scientists and medical researchers to ragtag teams of psychonaut undergrads, who scrape together a few thousand dollars and a research grant. We have especially gone off the rails when it comes to how a consortium of drug journalists tends to cover studies when they are released.

As a purveyor of substances and all things counter culture, I read most of these studies when they come out, and frankly, 90 percent of them are really poorly executed. Every day, I see a new study that hints at a splashy conclusion, like that shrooms make sex better or that a new LSD derivative might treat canine anxiety. Those are both real studies that I personally reported on or pitched, and there seems to be a new one every five minutes. So let’s analyze why these studies aren’t exactly good, or at the very least, why they are interpreted too broadly.

The canine anxiety study used a largely unheard-of LSD derivative on one particularly anxious, 13-year-old dog. And, not for nothing, the dog was still notably anxious by the end of the study, albeit less so than when they started. According to a questionnaire filled out before, during, and after the study, the dog just got slightly less anxious as a result of receiving 1cp‐LSD every three days for 30 days. 

The psilocybin and sex study drew on data sets from multiple online surveys in which participants self-reported on the effects of psychedelics that they “consumed in personal and ceremonial settings in the real world.” Only the second portion of the study involved a “phase II double-blind randomised controlled clinical trial” with a thoughtfully-chosen participant population. That approach is the only way you can really account for the multitude of biases that can and will enter into a study on something as subjective as a psilocybin experience or a sexual experience. But this part of the study only included 59 patients, and the study’s authors note that their conclusions are preliminary at best: “Being this the first quantitative investigation on the effects of psychedelics on sexual functioning/wellbeing, we strongly encourage further research on the topic in order to overcome the current limitations.” It also bears mentioning that almost any illegal drug is known to improve a sexual experience, including meth and heroin. 

A large swath of psychedelic studies are survey-based, which means they have a huge response bias in that they’re only getting answers from people who feel strongly enough one way or the other to fill out the survey. Many of these studies have a small pool of participants and only follow the participants for a short amount of time. 

My biggest pet peeve is that very rarely do any of these studies indicate selecting participants based on past or current usage of drugs. That shit matters! Giving someone LSD who has never done it before will lead to a vastly different subjective outcome than giving it to someone who has taken it once, and both of them will have a vastly different outcome than someone who has taken it 100+ times. As much as I criticize the often fast and loose research methods employed by big pharma companies, their studies still crush psychedelic studies nine times out of 10 when it comes to end-game scientific value. The point is, most people don’t see those caveats or even understand how to properly interpret research data; they just see the headline when a media outlet posts about it.

But really, first and foremost, the biggest issue is funding. Historically, the federal government has funded very little psychedelic research. Studying psychedelics is technically not illegal, but it requires extensive licensing, institutional approval, and DEA registration. Researchers almost always have to come up with private funding for the study, which is like trying to perform complex equations using a child’s abacus. We’re running a one-legged race trying to get accurate data on case uses for psychedelics, which is why almost every study published on them is held over a short time period, with a small number of research participants: The aforementioned canine anxiety study was performed on exactly one dog. We can bitch all the livelong day that the government needs to fund studies on these things, and we should! But we need to stop parading the data around like it means anything of value that we gave shrooms to a couple dozen people and they had good sex that night. 

Drug journalists are especially guilty of making these grandiose claims without the necessary caveats. Some are worse than others, and since we are a particularly small and incestuous community of degenerates, let me assure you that if I see you at the next trade show, you will receive a stern talking to. That said, I am just as guilty of this, because even my best-intentioned explanations of such things usually don’t appear until late in the article — and unfortunately, the TikTok generation doesn’t read past the headline. We need to report on this responsibly, even though it won’t get as many clicks. Trust me, I haven’t solved the issue of keeping media pubs solvent without incendiary reporting, but we still need to do better. The more nonsense we spout without proper data behind it, the harder it will be to make proper legislative progress. And frankly, we need to collectively start pushing the narrative that Americans don’t need a medically verifiable defense to do drugs.

In my humble opinion, the only defense anyone needs to take a drug is “I’m not hurting anyone.” That becomes a much more complex argument when you factor in the issue of addiction as a public nuisance. But almost nobody gets addicted to psychedelics, so our only defense to Congress and our respective state legislatures should be “they’re safe.” By almost every metric, Tylenol carries more inherent health risks than mushrooms. Unless we want access to psychedelics locked behind the same adamantium and mithril gate of impenetrable doom that we locked opioids behind, I suggest we start relying more on general safety than medical potential in our lobbying efforts.

I don’t mean to disparage the study of psychedelics. I simply want to encourage everyone to be careful about the conclusions they extrapolate from these studies. A good example of what I would consider to be the standard for how to conduct these studies are the studies on psilocybin for end-of-life anxiety, depression, and smoking cessation piloted by a group of medical experts and researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. That shit cost in the realm of $55 million, and they did it with the help of a federal grant — the first one given out in over 50 years, which means they were aboveboard enough for the feds to give them the green light. There were several different studies performed under the same organization, and they were performed on otherwise healthy volunteers with no prior history of psychedelic use. The researchers used double-blind studies, established a widely adopted list of safety guidelines for controlled psilocybin experience, lobbied for rescheduling of psilocybin from Schedule I to Schedule IV, and generally set a very good example for how to study these things that, frankly, is not emulated nearly enough in research efforts performed by other teams. However, it warrants mentioning that there are a myriad of other teams conducting great research in a similar fashion.

This is not to say substances like psilocybin and LSD don’t have incredible potential when it comes to improving mental health — they absolutely do. It’s just really problematic to post headlines about “shrooms might be good for this” and “LSD might treat that” without proper context or nuance to the information. It’s irresponsible, and it tells people who are suffering that the answer to what ails them lies in something they don’t have safe access to and, frankly, might make the problem worse. (Please see my long-winded rant on why psychedelics absolutely and unequivocally do not cure addiction.) This is uncharted territory we’re entering into as a community of advocates for our beloved tryptamines, and, as much as I love you all, we’re not treating it with the subtlety and caution it requires to reach a place where people get out of prison, and humans can trip in peace. 

As such, my pleas for better behavior are directed not at the general public, who, bless their hearts, can’t be trusted to understand much, but to the journalists who cover psychedelics and drug policy and to the organizations funding these studies. Please, for the love of all things tie-dye, stop with the goddamn press releases and articles every time somebody eats drugs and feels marginally better in some capacity. We need better data than you’re currently pushing — mankind deserves it. 

💌 If you loved this email, forward it to a psychonaut in your life.

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